Laravel: returning results from multiple related tables using eloquent

Question

I'm using Laravel 4 and in particular I'm looking for an answer that uses eloquent ORM.

I have a table "tasks" which containers a client_id and a user_id assigned to each row.

client_id refers to a client on a "clients" table and user_id refers to a user on a "users" table.

What I want to do: show all tasks and display the "clients" name and "users" first_name

So the result would look like this in my (blade) view:

@foreach($tasks as $task)
    <tr>
        <td>{{ $task->user->first_name }}</td>
        <td>{{ $task->client->name }}</td>
        <td>{{ $task->description }}</td>
    </tr>
@endforeach

The above view spits out the $task->client->name perfectly fine but unfortunately shows a "Trying to get property of non-object" when I add the line $task->user->first_name

My controller looks like this:

$tasks = Task::with(array('user', 'client'))->get();
return View::make('index', compact('tasks'));

As I understand it my models make a difference too, so my models look like this:

class Task extends Eloquent {
    protected $guarded = array();
    public static $rules = array();

    public function client() {
        return $this->belongsTo('Client');
    }

    public function user() {
        return $this->belongsTo('User');
    }
}

And:

class User extends Eloquent implements UserInterface, RemindableInterface {
    public function task()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Task');
    }
}

And:

class Client extends Eloquent {
    public function projects(){
        return $this->hasMany('Project', 'client_id');
    }
}

Any ideas on how to make this work? I've been scratching my head for a while - also note I'm not a database relationship pro so the simpler the explanation the better :)

Answer 1

I just worked through this and learned quite a few things myself. What I did was setup a many to many relationship between users and clients and created a pivot table for handling the relationship called tasks which also stores the description for each task.

It was too much to type here, but you can check out my code at http://paste.laravel.com/Fpv